One of the emerging technologies that was presented earlier this month at the Real Estate Connect conference in New York City is Qwiki (pronounced: "quick-ee"). At its core, Qwiki is one of the search-like services that have cropped up in recent years that attempts to provide context around user searches.

Most of these services work hard to position themselves as something other than a search engine. Probably because everyone knows that Google has very solidly won the competition for search-engine users.

In this week’s column I’m going to take a look at how Qwiki works and how it might be integrated into your real estate work (or not). Please keep in mind, as with other emerging technology I cover from time to time, that this is in the very, very early days for this particular technology (the site is in alpha).